Wednesday, January 23, 2008

Lost in Translation: From Script to Page

Mainstream comic books are rarely the product of one fertile imagination and talent. They are, to one degree or another, created by a team of motley individuals who band together for a common cause - much like the A-Team, but often much fatter.

Sure, you got your Matt Wagners and Erik Larsens out there* who have often single-handedly created entire comic books, doing all the writing, penciling, inking, coloring, and lettering themselves, but for the most part comics from the big publishers are produced by a team of creators who may never even meet each other face-to-face. A writer turns in his script, which is then passed on to a series of artists who pencil, ink, color, and letter the book, all under the all-knowing guidance of The Editor. (Editors have such important positions that their job title is capitalized, much like Realtors.)

The most crucial, fragile, and often dysfunctional relationship in this whole matrix is the creative bond between the writer and the penciler. These are the cats who are responsible for telling the actual story in the comic book, and if the two are not in simpatico, your comic book can get fucked up real bad.

A brief and likely unnecessary word on the process: These days, comic book writers create a detailed script for artists to illustrate. The script is broken down page by page and panel by panel, with dialogue and scene directions that describe the action. A good example of a standard format can be found here on the Dark Horse Comics website, but there is no real industry standard format.

The artist responsible for the pencils and layouts gets this script and then interprets it visually. If he or she is lucky, the writer doesn't get crazy with "camera directions" in the script and allows enough room for the artist to do what he or she theoretically does best, telling a story with pictures. Sometimes the writer and artist have a great relationship and work really well together, and sometimes they don't. And sometimes the artist just does whatever the hell they want regardless of what the damn script says.

I first noticed this disconnect in Batman: Year Two, a four-part series by writer Mike Barr that chronicles a young Batman's encounter with The Reaper, a spooky masked vigilante with no qualms about using his big-ass scythes on bad guys. The Reaper happens to be the father of a woman that Bruce Wayne has fallen in love with - how's that for shitty luck? Oh, umm, SPOILER! Sorry. Anyway, the first issue was drawn by Alan Davis, a modern legend and master of comic book art. For whatever reason, the rest of the series was drawn by this up-and-coming artist named Todd McFarlane. This pissed Young Dave off.

Despite being disappointed in the lack of Alan Davis Goodness for the rest of the storyline, it was interesting to see two different artists interpret different parts of the same script. Clearly Davis was the more accomplished sequential artist. Few living comic book artists could follow Alan Davis on a book and not suffer by comparison, and that was definitely the case with Year Two.

In the last chapter, drawn by McFarlane, Batman and The Reaper duel in a construction site under the moonlight, as superheroes often do. The climax of the story comes when Batman unmasks his foe and holy shit, it's his future father-in-law! But the big reveal is crammed into a few tiny panels at the bottom of a page. (see scan on left) A throw-away shot of Jim Gordon gets more page space than the climactic panel! Young Dave scratched his head, confused. How weird. Why would they jam this major story component into a few panels, almost as an afterthought.

The answer comes a few pages later, in a big full-page shot of Batman swinging over Gotham (see scan on right). Now here's my theory (and I could be totally wrong): McFarlane really wanted to end with a full-page shot of Batman, but it wasn't in Mike Barr's script. He's only got 22 pages to work with, so in order to make space for his pin-up shot he decides to move some other panels around. Maybe he draws the pages out of order, I don't know. But he gets in trouble and has to cram two pages worth of script into one page - and that one page just happens to be the most important page in the whole book. I could be totally off-base, but I would lay money that Barr's Year Two script didn't call for a pin-up page at the end and it was all McFarlane's doing. And as a result, what could have been a classic Batman comic is... not.

If anybody has insight into the making of Year Two, email me and let me know - if I'm mistaken I'll gladly eat my invisible hat and post a retraction of these slanderous lies.

Sure, there's got to be some give and take, some room for the artist to play around with the script. But it seems like the farther an artist deviates from the script, the more the story suffers.

Captain America and The Falcon is a good example. The kick-off storyline of this ill-fated title was written by Christopher Priest with Bart Sears on art. For whatever reason, Sears decided to get a little experimental and injected these huge pin-ups of Cap and Falcon as framing devices for the story panels. The result is an odd and unsatisfying read.

"...Bart chose a page layout design that utterly confused even the most basic storytelling ... Ignoring instructions and warnings abut how important it was to keep the lines straight and clear, Bart chose to insert—for no apparent reason—poster-shot images of Captain America and the Falcon on most every page. Accommodating these required the other panels to be modified, reduced or eliminated altogether, making the pages very hard to follow. I wrote the thing and didn’t have an earthly clue what was going on."

Me either, Christopher.

Sometimes language differences between writer and artist(s) leads to disastrous and hilarious results, as in the case of Thor #499, The Worst Comic Book Ever Made Ever (which I discussed here and here.) The script, by one of my favorite writers Bill Messner-Loebs, is not great - and that's a nice way of saying it sucks. However, matters were made worse because the art chores were handled by an unknown number of Brazilian artists from Deodato Studios who didn't follow the not-great script very closely at all. Aside from the rushed art and hideous coloring, the costumes of certain characters change from panel to panel and a character who is supposed to get kidnapped in the beginning of the comic keeps popping up in the background of panels.

Here's a good example of what happens when a script truly gets lost in translation:

How exactly does Heimdall or whoever he is utter those lines when his mouth is gagged? Magic.

Sometimes even the most faithful interpretation of the writer's script can have unintended consequences, as in the case of New Avengers #35 by writer Brian Michael Bendis and artist Leinl Yu. This is the moderately infamous issue where superhero Tigra gets ambushed in her apartment and beaten by the demonic Hood while one of his cronies videotapes the attack. Some readers (and non-readers) were upset because they felt the scene had a creepy, sexualized subtext and many accused Bendis of misogyny. In response to some of the criticism, Bendis did an interview with Newsarama and posted a portion of his script so people could read how the scene was described. Check it out, it's interesting reading.

One of the things that made the scene particularly unpalatable for some was the panel above, where one of Tigra's breasts is popping out of her blouse as she's pistol-whipped. The juxtaposition of sex and violence in this panel in particular is a little creepy. But as you can read for yourself, Bendis' script doesn't call for breast-poppage or describe the beating in titillating terms - that's all a decision made by Yu, who interpreted the script.

I think it's fair to find the scene upsetting because Tigra's beating is videotaped and later shown to The Hood's crew as a morale booster - that alone is loaded with enough connotations to make it extra-creepy. Bendis wrote that scene. But you can't really blame Bendis if the art seems disturbingly lascivious - he didn't draw the thing and didn't ask that it be drawn that way.

In the piece, David details with a sort of bemused resignation the frustrating and inevitable changes to the story as defined in his script. It's pretty funny and very illuminating, because you get the impression from David's commentary that shit like this happens all the time in comics.

The artist who interpreted David's script happens to be Bart Sears, who I swear I'm not trying to pick on. Take a look at this page from The Scream:

Here's Peter David's SPOILERY explanation of how just a little change to one panel can completely derail the entire story:

"Here's the thing--the reader is supposed to believe that Danny has transformed into the Scream. Except he hasn't, because the Scream is actually an illusion that everyone else is seeing but actually isn't there. Unfortunately the effect is undercut by the fact that Danny is visibly lying there in the lower left. He shouldn't be, nor is there anything in the script that indicates he should be. If this series is collected in trade, I'd really like it if Dark Horse could go back in and remove Danny from the art in that page."

Let's face it: Comic books often suck or just make no damn sense. But the reason why a book sucks ass is not always obvious. Sometimes the art is horrible, or the script is hackneyed and unoriginal. But sometimes, through circumstances beyond the control of the writer, the comic that reaches the shelves is not quite what he or she had in mind - something just gets lost in translation.

*I know that a huge number of small press comics are the creations of a single dedicated individual, and I tip my invisible hat to them, but I'm limiting the discussion to mainstream spandex fly/hit/explode comics.

54 comments:

Commander McSnark
said...

Agreed, Alan Davis left big shoes to fill (like Kevin Maguire did on the CAPTAIN AMERICA: SENTINEL OF LIBERTY limited series), but Todd McFarlane will go to his grave without ever coming remotely close to doing so. Because he is Made Of Suck. Nice backgrounds on those fight scenes, Todd! Oh, wait--most of those panels don't have backgrounds! (Yes, I know, at Image that absence became a meme.) It's amazing how many of the basic elements of visual storytelling (like, say, human anatomy and proportion, not to mention the ability to draw normal, mundane objects) were utterly beyond the abilities of wonderboys like McFarlane and Liefeld. Can you imagine a book like CRIMINAL, that relies on a million details of lighting and mood and facial expression, as "interpreted" by Rob Liefeld? The mind boggles--it would look like a coloring book compared to the real thing.

God, just trying to imagine that left a stain on my brain. (And it's a stain that can only be removed with porn. Yay!) I feel damn sorry for writers now, though. It also makes me appreciate a lot more the times when creative teams do click. STARMAN before Tony Harris left springs to mind, for one.

Gee, Dave, this was very well thought-out and...dare I say it...pithy. You do make a very good point, that the writer really has very little say in what actually ends up being printed. In our rush to condemn, sometimes, we the fans, are too apt to blame the wrong person.

I remember another McFarlane "interpretation" that still gives me chuckles to this day. Go pick up 'Hulk Visionaries: Peter David, Volume One', and read the first issue in the book. It's an issue that establishes a key plot point for the next year's worth of storylines: The grey Hulk changes at night, due to sunlight interfering with gamma radiation, and moonlight (being reflected sunlight) makes him calmer during the full moons, and angrier during the new moons. It's vital to this plot that it take place during a new moon, because Banner has artificially blocked the change, and he's acting Hulkish because it's a new moon. Key plot point.

What does Todd do? Draws a big, dramatic-looking full moon in every single outdoor shot. There are points in the issue where characters look up at the massive, bright full moon in the sky, and say, "There's no moon out tonight..."

Bob Fleming told me an amusing story about how lack of communication between him and Trevor Von Eeden led to a real big difference between what he wanted for the splash page of Thriller #7 and what TVE actually gave him- the request for an establishing shot to show that the Thrillers' building was indeed in NYC became a postcard on one of the characters' dressing table.

I think Sears started doing that "full page pinup" thing was his stint drawing Eclipso in the 90's- it kinda worked on that, so apparently he must have decided that would be his stylistic calling card or somesuch, perhaps he even thought it made his pages look designerly a la J.H. Williams III. Who knows.

Brilliant! for years I've half wondered why I found Batman Year Two so very unsatisfying (McFarlane's art contributon is actually not bad overall) - but that's exactly it. The conclusion hidden in a rush of miniscule panels. Thanks for clearing that up!

Now we know the REAL reason why Todd McF left Marvel to found Image. He was sick of all these pesky, annoying writers totally harshing his groove with their, "You ruined the climax" this and "Why is there a moon when the script says there's no moon" that. Once he got to Image, he could show those nattering no-no boys how to REALLY write a comic book!

It really wasn't the money. It was so he could have the unfettered artistic freedom to create the scintillating writing brilliance that was "Spawn."

I admit, even I have used the "full-body pose to frame the other panels" thing before in my webcomic: http://lightbringer.comicgenesis.com/d/20071116.html

But my use of it can be excused for a few reasons:1. My art sucks.2. The full-body panel is actually having a conversation with an omniscient voice, analyzing the various members of the team that have been put together.3. I only do it for ONE PAGE.4. Did I mention my art sucks?

In any case, this is a great article. The only other example I can think of of writer/artist disconnect is for ASBAR #1, where Miller writes in the script that the cop car should be demolished, but Jim Lee somehow interprets that as "cop car should be split in half." Any other examples out there?

I suppose one reason Silver Age Marvel Comics always look so great and coherent is that Stan Lee's scripts were of the...

"Spidey meets Vulture in Midtown, they fight, you come up with the rest"

...variety. Stan The Man gave ample room for pencilers to do whatever the hell they wanted.

I guess the opposite extreme would be Alan Moore. Ever read one of his scripts? His stuff his so incredibly detailed, it's almost like paint-by-the-numbers (even if some of his Image stuff was, indeed, kind of derailed by crappy art).

Great write up Dave! I'm fairly certain a similar situation happened on the Generation X comics in the 90's. There were some issues that were down right unreadable due to the art not matching the story at all. I remember one issue where Marvel had to reprint a few panels from earlier issues and an appology to readers as key moments of the storyline were missing.

Oh, and if you're looking for some Gold Key comics (for an awesome read of course!) I found a stash at a used book store in Tacoma.

That YEAR TWO reveal would have worked so much better if it had been right after the page break--then you'd turn the page and be all "climactic ending!". (What sucks is when you can tell they tried to do that, but putting the ad pages in meant that it ended up on the facing page, where you could see it ahead of time.) But of course having the layout serve the story would mean less room for logic- and gravity-defying capes and stuff, which are way cooler than all that "plot" and "story" crap. Image rulz! Now pass me the bong.

As bad as that is, the garbage produced by Deodato Sweatshop--ahem--Studios in those worst-ever Thor issues makes it look like Alan Davis' work by comparison. That crap is just embarrassing. And Dwayne the Canoe Guy hits it in calling out the editors too--what are they there for, if not to catch stuff like that before it makes it into print?

It's really tough to believe Bendis on the no misogyny thing. It's bandied about anecdoteally that he dislikes Tigra, and it's my kneejerk reaction to believe him. I mean, he talks about using characters equally, but the issue before Tigra got beat down we saw Wolverine having a REAL fight with Hood. Wolverine lost and got his junk shot off, but he wasn't ambushed and beaten down like a total punk (and, let's be frank here - the Hood's power is having guns and a cloak that makes him invisible when he holds his breath. Wolverine's won against opponents much more dangerous). The New Avengers roll in later to confront Hood and his crew, and again, no one is made to look like a chump.

It just doesn't bear out.

Let him off if the art's overly sexual, by all means - personally, I didn't really notice it at the time.

"The real problem here, I feel, is that the editors are not doing their job. Isn't it the responsibility of the editor to insure that the art match the script?"

Yes, but it's also the responsibility of the editor to make sure that the book gets to the printer on time, and sometimes those can be mutually incompatible.

In 'Year Two', for example, we don't know how close to deadline McFarlane turned in those pages. As an editor, your choice becomes, "Do I send these pages back to Todd McFarlane, demand he redraw him, get into a huge fight with him, get back another set of pages that may or may not be any more satisfactory than the ones he's just given me (and that certainly won't be his best work, because he'll be angry and sullen about having to make the changes), delay the book, possibly cause issues with the letterer, colorist, and printer, all of whom have other commitments that are time-sensitive...or do I let it go out the door as is, and hope that fans will be mollified over the weak reveal by a pretty sharp full-page shot of Batman?"

Redrawing even one page of a comic can delay it by a full day; when you're operating on a thirty-day schedule for the whole production, you frequently do not have the time to make it perfect. (Which would be an argument for allowing late books, except that it's not like you get money even if a book doesn't ship that month. A slightly-less-than-perfect book that ships twelve times a year makes twice as much money as a perfect book that ships three times a year.)

I remember reading an Alan Davis interview where he stated that Detective Comics editor Denny O'Neil never returned his phone calls. So Davis chose to leave the book and go to Marvel, where Chris Claremont wanted him to do Excalibur.

I wonder what Batman: Year Two writer Mike W. Barr's reaction to the artist switch was. I also wonder if we should read anything into the fact that Mike W. Barr never worked with the Toddster again.

Peter David has talked about how characters in issue 3 of Atlantis Chronicles changed genders from male to female when Spanish artist Esteban Maroto intrepreted all the Atlantean names ending with "a" as feminine. :)

Being a Kubert School graduate, I've seen many, many examples of the artist not following the script closely. One our assignments in the 3rd year writing class was to write dialogue for a page that covered the plot points the artist avoided drawing. IIRC, it was the first issue of Heroes For Hire & artist Pascal Ferry avoided drawing an establishing shot of the United Nations. Because of this, it was unclear where exactly a hostage situation was taking place.

There was an issue of Deadpool written by Priest and partially penciled by frequent Sears inker Andy Smith where Smith drew a big establishing picture of Deadpool leaning on story panels to transition from a flashback to the present. It wasn't in the script Priest wrote as dialogue for Deadpool, "Well the artist decided to draw this big pin-up shot of me for no reason..." Smith wasn't happy about that. But then again, it wasn't in the script! I mean, I could tell it was a transitionary thing, but I'm sure it annoyed the hell out of Priest.

A great comic for script/art disconnect was X-Treme X-Men, written by Chris Claremont and drawn by Salvador Larocca. I'm pretty sure English isn't Larocca's first language (he was born in Spain) which, paired with Claremont's love of describing everything that happens in dialogue and caption boxes to the point where you wonder whether he realizes that comics are actually illustrated, led to several scenes where what we saw was very clearly not what was supposed to be happening. The one scene I remember most specifically involved dialogue and captions making it very clear Bishop was supposed to be using his powers to fire energy blasts while the art showed him blasting away with pistols. Another issue had him meeting an Australian cop on a motorcylce that looked like a Final Fantasy character riding one of the light bikes from Tron. There was at least one example of art that didn't seem quite right in almost every issue.

A recent example of disconnect - in another Claremont book, coincidentally - is the most recent Exiles, where Sabertooth makes a big deal about presenting the team with new costumes and insisting they wear them so they look and feel more like a team. Everyone splits up to change into their new uniforms, after which Psylocke's outfit changes slightly and everyone else dresses exactly the same as they had been for the rest of the issue.

Re: Gwen Stacy's death & "the *crack* heard round the world" (actually a snap), I've never heard that it was unscripted. It doesn't seem at all out of place to me. Can anyone shed any light on the subject?

The real problem is that the artists and writers are not truly collaborating on their work.

Consider Neil Gaiman's ETERNALS series and Howard Mackie's run on SPIDER-MAN, both illustrated by John Romita Jr. Mackie got a lot better art out of JRJR than Gaiman did, because he made a point of knowing what his artist liked to draw and crafting stories that catered to that. Whereas Gaiman's story was filled with talking heads sequences that were then just passed off to an artist with absolutely no interest in drawing that stuff.

When the writer and artist are just cogs instead of a team, you can't be all that surprised when the results are mediocre or worse.

There's a story about Gwen's *snap* (thanks for the correction - you'd think I'd know better than to post while short on sleep and 1000 miles from my comics collection... but then, I probably wouldn't be posting right now, either... Which might be a good thing, especially considering how long this parenthetical is getting...)

Where was I?

Oh, right.

There's a thing about it in the preface to the TPB. Says there it was unscripted.

I wouldn't really be surprised if it was. Despite the significance of it. I believe it was common practice for details like sound effects to be left up to the people whose job it was to put them in.

But I guess that would be the letterer in this case, rather than the artist. And while it changes the entire meaning of the scene, it doesn't necessarily screw everything up (like a moon that specifically wasn't supposed to be there). So it probably doesn't belong in this post, after all.

This is exactly the reason why I am uncomfortable with being harshly critical about any one person's contribution to an ultimately failed project (regardless of the medium)--because I don't know the back story of its creation and also because I myself know exactly what it's like to be criticized by a reviewer for a poor decision made by someone else behind my back.

It was only when I got a copy of my sixth book in my hands that I had learned that a) the publisher had changed the title to the nonsensical Haunting Fireside Stories (I have no idea what that's suppose to mean either) and b) the managing editor had decided the first story had "too many endings" and at the very last minute (when I wasn't around to stop her) cut the one she felt was most disposable, even though it left two important characters trapped together in a closet with their fates totally unresolved. Needless to say the people who've been critical of this narrative mistake have always chosen to blame me for it rather than the person actually responsible.

I think every writer has at least one or two horror stories like this to tell. I can't speak for others, but in my case it definitely made me more forgiving of other people's screw-ups and less sympathetic towards those who react to such errors with sarcastic vitriol. It's a lot harder to expect perfection from others when you truly appreciate the thousands of tiny pitfalls that can unexpectedly get in the way through no fault of your own.

You'll also notice, my dear Dave Campbell, how cramped the bottom of that MacFarlane page is. Up top he's all "HELLS YEAH HERE ARE SOME BIG OL' PANELS! I'M DRAWING THE SHIT OUT OF THIS COMIC!" But by the time he gets to the bottom it's crampsville. Not quite the sliver-thin panels adorning the nethers of Liefeld's pages, it's the same idea.

I'm not the World's biggest McFarlane fan, but I'm fairly sure that Year Two was intended to end with a splash panel. Year One ended with a splash and I'm sure that was deliberately echoed by Barr. That said, I'm sure I read somewhere that Barr had already written the full story before Davis left. And that Davis preferred to work from a plot. That would mean McFarlane was responsible for the pacing.